Google has added a presentation package, similar to PowerPoint, to their free online collaborative tools suite, GoogleDocs.

The presentation tool in GoogleDocs is simple and lacks many features - it offers limited choices for fonts, color and layout and doesn’t offer the ability to “build” a sequence to demonstrate a concept. However, it does allow multiple people to edit the same slides in real time.

Slate has a review of the software and, at the end of the article, a PowerPoint presentation presented as a movie that summarizes the article - it’s a good example of ways that presentation tools can be used to emphasize points or clarify concepts.

review at Slate

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Science publishing will become more interactive and more interesting due to Open Acess and Web 2.0, according to Bora Zivkovic, Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science), writer of the blog “A Blog Around the Clock” and organizer of the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. He discussed “Science Blogging: Science 2.0” at ConvergeSouth on October 19^th.

Session Description:“Science blogs, wikis, Facebook, Open Access Publishing, Open Notebook Science - how the Web is changing the way science is done, organized, taught, published and communicated.”

He began with a review of science publishing, starting with the Gutenberg printing press, through the roles of scientific societies, and how journals began and the development of the format of the scientific paper. The human genome project made data freely available online, which opened up science communication and competitionand sped progress, facilitating sequencing of the genes of other organisms. Bora believes the human genome project is the beginning of changing science publishing, because genome sequences do not easily fit into the straitjacket of the style of scientific papers, and genome sequences can be peer reviewed after publication rather than before.

Open access publishing may be the next step. More and more journals are becoming open access. You can use materials published under Open access in any way you would like, as long as you cite the original. For example, you can copy and paste the entire article or parts of it elsewhere – including to your blog. Some papers include data files that you can download and analyze yourself, filtering it through your ideas and your software. The data can be reinterpreted and published again.

PLoS (Public Library of Science) publishes 8 open access journals. Two are highly selective (PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine). Four other journals are equivalent to society journals. PLoS ONE publishes peer reviewed information on all science, as long as it is well done and well written. Publication is quick – there is an average of 9 weeks from submission 19 days between acceptance and publication.

PLoS ONE allows readers to annotate, comment and rate articles. Each comment has a doi, which means you can cite the comment. At least one comment has included data. Bora speculated that if Watson and Crick had published their paper in a journal like PLoS ONE, there would be 5 decades of comments, including links to papers that were published later. There would be an entire history of molecular biology, available easily to everyone. Being able to easily access, comment on and interact with a scientific publication will change science education.

Bora’s job is to moderate the comments; he notices some cultural differences in how scientists versus bloggers express themselves, and is interested in how the style of scientific papers may be changed by the ability to comment later. Comments and ratings have the potential to change the rhetoric of science.

PLoS is also experimenting with making science videos accessible. On the SciVee website, videos associated with published papers are on the left, and other videos are on the right. These videos are fun to explore.

• Listen to Bora’s presentation
• See an extensive list of Bora Zivkovic’s Science Blogging Links



• Attend the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference for more discussion on the future of science communication.
• Consider attending ConvergeSouth next year, October 17-18, 2008 in
  Greensboro, North Carolina.

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Google Earth has updated its images for North Carolina (and many other places) on October 23, 2007. Bostock library is now visible in Google Earth (but not yet in Google Maps)! Below,  I’ve embedded the Google Map above an image from Google Earth. Do you see what’s missing in the map?    Google Maps images of Duke were updated less than a week after Google Earth; now the images are the same.

There have been updates to other areas - Crater Lake in Oregon is an even better demonstration of the terrrain in 3D.

There are new tutorials for Google Earth to show you how to publish the same material in both Google Earth and Google Maps, including videos in your materials.

Here’s a PowerPoint presentation on including Google Maps in your website. And a tutorial. (But, it’s pretty easy - you can go to Google Maps, click “link to this page” and follow the directions. )

Frank Taylor, on his Google Earth Blog, points to several sources of images and mapping tools for the California fires.

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Audio and even video capture of lectures is becoming more common on college campuses, which post the material to their Web sites so that students can revisit a lecture after the fact.

But Drexel University in Philadelphia, long known as a technology powerhouse, is using the university’s academic capture product in another way. There, instructors are far more likely to produce recordings from their desktops, including individual commentaries to a student from a professor. Staff members also are using rich media recording software, a product from TechSmith called Camtasia Studio, in new ways, such as creating online training videos for new hires.

However, where Camtasia really shines at the university is in what Drexel’s director of academic technology innovation, John Morris, calls “individual capture.” Most Drexel instructors who are taking advantage of Camtasia, he said, are using it at their desktops… ( Here’s an example* of a professor providing written and audio feedback while marking up a student’s paper and recording the process in a Camtasia video.  *Need a RealPlayer to view the video)

The source is from: Linda L Briggs, “Drexel Puts Course Capture To Work on Desktops,” Campus Technology, 10/24/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=52378

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Technology plays a major role in Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s new course titled Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century. The course “makes innovative use of all the tools and technical know-how a major university can deliver” including a course Web site with texts, images, artwork, music, geographic, cultural, and historical resources, even a virtual ship tour. According to Greenblatt, his use of new technologies - including GoogleEarth, digital images, and digital video - reflects his latest scholarly thinking, allows for true interdisciplinary approaches and stimulates deep engagement with the material and creativity in his students. Greenblatt is a world-renowned scholar of Renaissance literature and University Professor of the Humanities working on ways to “cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties.” For details of how the course is organized and how technology is used, see the Chronicle of Higher Education’s description.

The library guide for the course reflects the rich array of materials used.

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The Social Science Research Network has announced the creation of the Humanities Research Network (HRN). Humanities Research Network is intended to be a world-wide, comprehensive online resource for research in humanities, providing scholars with access to current work in their field and facilitating research and scholarship.

HRN will begin with the following networks:

HRN CLASSIC RESEARCH NETWORK (Director: Lesley Dean-Jones, University of Texas at Austin)

HRN ENGLISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE RESEARCH NETWORK (Director: Susan Heinzelman, University of Texas at Austin)

HRN PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH NETWORK (Directors: Lawrence Becker, Hollins University and Brie Gertler, University of Virginia)

A list of the eJournals abstracted by each of these networks is at: http://www.ssrn.com/update/crn/crnann/annA001.html

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ConvergeSouth is an annual blogger conference in Greensboro, NC, held October 19 and 20^th 2007. From the website, it’s a “combination of a blogger-con and a creativity center”

My questions about why people blog and how blogging can shape someone’s world were answered in a keynote presentation entitled “Changing Your World with Blogs” by Elisa Camahort, founder of BlogHer. Even if you don’t have your own blog, you are part of blogging community, by reading blogs and commenting, so your world is changing because of blogs. This session gave specific examples of blogs changing the world and I took many notes, summarized below.

(more…)

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This is a recently posted video that examines the way information organization is changing with digital media. It compares physical media, which requires a physical location, with digital media, which requires perhaps no more than tags. According to its creator, this video “was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.” See the video on You Tube.

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A Canadian archives of public domain sheet music, put together by volunteers, has been taken down by the owner of the site.  A German music company sent a “cease and desist” letter to the site’s owner, asking that protections be put in place to block access to some pieces that are still under copyright in some countries.  (Works in  Europe are protected for seventy years after the death of the composer and for fifty years in Canada.)  The site owner was unable to put such a system in place and has shut it down, offering up the domain name and materials to an organization that might be able to keep it running.

The incident is a good example that demonstrates how varying copyright laws need to be taken into account when posting public domain material online for projects.

article at The Register

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Michael L. Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, has posted another YouTube video about how students learn.

The four-minute video features the results of a survey of students in Mr. Wesch’s Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class last spring. The students developed the survey and wrote the script. In the video students hold up placards showing their responses, on average, to several questions. The students said they complete only half of the readings assigned to them and that only a quarter of the readings are relevant to their lives. They said their average class size is 115, and that only 18 percent of the professors they have had know their names. Watch the YouTube video , Read more

The source is from The Wired Campus.

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